(Op-Ed) Our Elites Still Don't Get It

[The Romulan Republic]

Well, the incentive would be "keep Trump and his fellow nut jobs out of power". Which was enough to win the popular vote, but not in the right places.

Perhaps. But I know from bitter experience that having to do a 'tactical' vote between one party that is more or less actively trying to kill you and one party that merely wants to make your life thoroughly unpleasant on the principle of "less eligibility", and any third party that doesn't include a pledge to make your demographic stop existing in its manifesto is hopelessly outmatched, it becomes very hard to resist the impulse to say "a pox on both your houses" and spoil your ballot paper out of pique.

Understandable, but that doesn't change the fact that its a decision made out of anger, despair, and spite, rather than one that will actually effect any positive change.

[The Romulan Republic]

But there is also a death count now, one that bothers you a lot less than potential collapse, because you're not directly exposed to it.

Oh, yeah, if I don't agree with you its just because I don't care about people dying because I'm privileged. Sing me a new tune, why don't you? Like, maybe, addressing my arguments rather than attacking my character.

To be blunt, I am sick of talking to you, because you seem to always resort immediately to personal attacks upon my motivations and character, to fit me into the "hypocritical western imperialist" box your ideology requires me to fit into.

Its an ad hominem, and its beneath you. You don't have to be privileged or indifferent to the suffering of others to be scared by the possibility of a violent social collapse. Nor am I indifferent to the suffering and destruction that takes place under the status quo, although I will admit that it is frequently human nature to respond to the prospect of an unfamiliar or sudden danger with greater fear than an horrible but familiar status quo. I am not immune to that.

Of course, the two are not unrelated. I am also well aware that the intolerable status quo may lead to the violent upheaval that I fear, and so even if I were utterly devoid of concern for anyone but myself, that would be reason enough for me to take the death and suffering under the status quo seriously.

It is a problem, because you're not on the receiving end of the stick, and you've probably never been, you can't appreciate what it feels like. And that is you, a person who generally holds progressive views, correctly thinks that a lot of Trump supporters and America Firsters are racists, etc. Think about how callous those people would be to others located halfway across the globe. There is a real possibility that what comes next may be worse. It can be worse with a collapse or without it, but the possibility is always there.

Um, yeah, Trump and his ilk will be even more horrible to people located in other parts of the world. So would a general collapse of contemporary American/Western society. You think such a collapse wouldn't have catastrophic economic effects around the world? And that those would not lead to dire political effects? It was our asshole businessmen who caused the Great Recession, but it was the Middle East and Eastern Europe that got plunged into war, upheaval, and massive refugee crises over it. If American society collapses, odds are it will become something more resembling Nazi Germany than a progressive utopia. Who do you think such states turn their violence against?

The weaker and less privileged always suffer more. That doesn't change in a state of social collapse. Its amplified.

Its seldom the men at the top who get it worst in any sort of catastrophe. Its the men and women and children in the trenches, and in the streets, and likely disproportionately those who are poor or minorities. You are smart enough and educated enough to know this, but too ideologically committed to acknowledge it honestly, so you resort to attacking me instead.

It may be that the person in question is entirely dissatisfied with the lack of progress and considers "incremental reform" simply no progress at all.

Incremental reform is objectively different from "no reform." And sitting still because your car broke down is objectively better than driving off of a cliff. Their are worse things than the status quo, even for those who suffer most under it.

When people are frustrated, or afraid, or angery, their is a temptation to just do something, no matter how reckless or destructive (indeed, the wilder or more destructive the better, sometimes). Something to break the deadlock, to vent your anger and frustration and despair. And when you feel that the Sword of Damocles is hanging over your head, their is an impulse to have the sword fall. I know because I've felt it myself.

A sudden, violent collapse is more viscerally, emotionally satisfying than incremental change. It appeals to our base instincts: to, I believe, the same part of our psychology as the apocalypse myth. Which is part of why we should be very wary of it.

It may be that this person is on the receiving end of the system's baton, so he/she is not certain of success after change, but hopes for it because the current situation was or is barely bearable for him/her. Think about this.

What makes you think I haven't thought about it?

I'll admit that I'm as capable of bias and poor judgment as the next man, but you seem to assume that "disagreeing with your conclusions" means "naïve due to privilege". This is, frankly, highly arrogant of you.

Do you really think I talk about the deep problems of wealth & poverty, alienation and desintegration of solidarity in the current system just because I'm a lazy privileged person who can't have a bit of patience with "incremental reform", or that I am a callous and stupid person?

No.

First, I did not say that those who are impatient with incremental reform are lazy and privileged. That is you putting words in my mouth.

The comment about "callous or stupid" was directed at aerius. But in deference to you, I will add a third option- ideologues who are so committed to their particular world view that they will accept virtually any negative consequences or implications of that world view as acceptable losses in pursuit of what they feel is the greater good.

[Simon_Jester]

But the critical issue lies with the fact that GDP is also a measure of concentration of wealth. Extremely high "GDP" of certain banking enclaves and global financial centers does not mean that there is an abundance of production in these territories. Quite the contrary, it only indicates the territories which are being used to siphon wealth that is extracted at source from the territories where production takes place. The gap between Hong Kong and China, for example, does not mean that Hong Kong is an hyper-efficient production center, but rather only that is a conduit for capital flows (inflows and outflows) into the largest production zone in the world...

Right, which is why I didn't compare the countries with the highest and lowest GDPs (those which have near-zero production and control much production, and those which have near-zero production and control none). I compared countries with relatively moderate per capita GDP by developed standards (those MORE likely to be producing on a scale commensurate with their wealth), and countries with relatively moderate GDP by developing standards (e.g. China or Turkey). The latter nations are not in all ways enviable, but which are clearly not just giant nation-sized pits of enslaved laborers toiling solely to enrich the bankers in some distant metropolis, without benefit to themselves).

As actual incomes, especially wage incomes, lie well below "GDP per capita" and the gap between "GDP" and actual worker income is only growing for the last 40 years, averaging out the GDP per capita becomes a strange method of solving the problem...

You are failing to understand, then attacking the misunderstanding.

My point is that the total, combined productive capacity of all the world put together, as roughly measured by summing up the GDP of all nations, is already sufficient to provide a life for all people in the world that is not terribly bad by 20th century standards, and by no means a grim dystopian hell or whatever nonsense a gloomy nihilistic edgy fool might predict. The problem, and I do not mean to minimize the scope of this problem, is reordering society so that this productive capacity can be directed in a way other than the unlimited concentration of all wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

As of this time, much of the growth in gross world output of wealth is being concentrated into the hands of a minority, creating the gap you describe between GDP and median income. It is not wrong to point out this trend exists, but we should not assume it is inevitable or will proceed to infinity just because it has proceeded thus far.

The current system of production favors a spatial concentration of wealth. It is designed to produce this result, not the other way around.

What is the reason to pay more or provide more to a peasant or worker in the middle of nowhere, who has no control whatsoever over capital flows? There is a reason to pay more to people who exert at least some tiny share of control over the machines and over the capital flows, hence the concentration of wealth around "control centers", but everyone else is bound to be left behind. Concentration is natural. De-concentration is forced, and unnatural, and it is basically reversing the natural development of markets and capitalism itself.

A lot of unnatural things have in fact happened or been done.

The point I am trying to make is that the pie is in fact big enough for everyone to have a share that is not too bad. Everyone, worldwide. Dividing up the pie to make this happen is a very formidable challenge and may even be impossible... But let us not lie to ourselves and commit the sin of defeatism, by pretending the pie was never big enough to begin with. Or that this is necessarily a zero-sum game in which the elites must destroy and crush and immiserize the majority in order to sustain a remotely comfortable way of life.

So it's not so much that good standards of living are unsustainable. Certainly we can hope to live pretty well by 20th century standards. The problem is going to be shifting the economic underpinnings of the system into one that will work in the automated economy that can hope to provide for the whole world, instead of just having 80% of the world be miserable to support 20% in Elysium.

Why, if production is tightly concentrated, should anyone be provided with anything outside the immediate zones where production occurs (there, compensation levels will be determined by "bargaining" or, in terms I like more, class struggle) and the zones where capital flows are controlled (the super-rich cities)? To prevent a march on the cities? That can be dealt with. The outsiders should be provided with the bare minimum to stop them from coalescing into a serious rebellion. This level can be determined empirically, how cruel it may sound.

The fundamental answer is "this is a thing that may or may not happen, but can happen." Basically, you're attempting to prove that guaranteed minimum income can never come into de facto existence on a worldwide basis. Under the present system you may or may not be correct.

I would argue there is a realistic chance of transitioning to an environment in which this becomes possible over the next century or so. However, there are many obstacles and many other, grimmer futures that might unfold. It is not certain. My point is that there is no reason to suppose that it is literally impossible.

Are you saying that the entire population of the developed countries should be basically turned into rentiers who live on rent extracted from their control (or rather, their corporate and government control) over the production and distribution of goods in the rest of the world?

No, I'm saying that in the extreme limiting end state of a heavily automated global economy that renders low and lightly-skilled labor in large part superfluous to the production of goods... Everybody should be turned into rentiers who live on rent extracted from everyone's control of the whole world.

This is necessary for the survival of the majority of future humans, because the majority of future humans will have relatively little to contribute to the collective enterprise of the production economy through their labor. Because of automation.

My whole point is that even if the present developed nations lose their special privilege, if we just added up all the gross domestic products in the world and divided by the number of people in the world, we'd get a per capita GDP comparable to, say, China. And the idea 'everyone is on average about as wealthy as the people living in China are' may be unappealing to some, and appealing to others, but no one should be saying "I'd rather jump off a cliff than live that way."

[K. A. Pital]

Right, which is why I didn't compare the countries with the highest and lowest GDPs (those which have near-zero production and control much production, and those which have near-zero production and control none). I compared countries with relatively moderate per capita GDP by developed standards (those MORE likely to be producing on a scale commensurate with their wealth), and countries with relatively moderate GDP by developing standards (e.g. China or Turkey). The latter nations are not in all ways enviable, but which are clearly not just giant nation-sized pits of enslaved laborers toiling solely to enrich the bankers in some distant metropolis, without benefit to themselves).

You've failed to understand my objection. It was a general objection to the use of GDP per capita as a measure of the standard of living. In fact, considering what is known, using the median income or median wage is preferred when talking about this. You will see why, in a bit. The world average GDP per capita already equals the Chinese one. But the distribution is not uniform because of the spatial concentration of production & consumption and the capital flows. I mean, distribution isn't uniform even on national scale for very large nations, so it is even less uniform on a world scale. And if history shows us anything it is that the non-uniform nature of it, the so-called "gap", has only grown and expanded, and not contracted, over capitalism's historical development that spans 200-300 years. Now you come with an absolutely flawed metric for the standard of living - I'd wish we could stop using it alltogether - and say there is a solution to our problems.

My point is that the total, combined productive capacity of all the world put together, as roughly measured by summing up the GDP of all nations, is already sufficient to provide a life for all people in the world that is not terribly bad by 20th century standards, and by no means a grim dystopian hell or whatever nonsense a gloomy nihilistic edgy fool might predict. The problem, and I do not mean to minimize the scope of this problem, is reordering society so that this productive capacity can be directed in a way other than the unlimited concentration of all wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

The total productive capacity of the world, with the exception of massive war periods, was often acceptable or even exceeding the requirements to provide a decent, by the standards of the time, life for all or most people in the world. If we consider the greater importance of non-monetary transactions in the past and the fact that the standard of living is not so directly related to GDP, we may discover that we always had a relative abundance, but failed to provide most people with it. The achievement of a universally-spread median world GDP does not mean that the typical world citizen (let's imagine a world united and construct an optimistic model for a moment) would even receive a wage comparable to the average Chinese wage, now. It is painstakingly clear when you look at the GDP vs. consumption patterns and see that there could be a difference of 100% or more between consumption values for nations that have the same GDP / capita. It would internalize the distribution problem, but it will remain unsolved.

As of this time, much of the growth in gross world output of wealth is being concentrated into the hands of a minority, creating the gap you describe between GDP and median income. It is not wrong to point out this trend exists, but we should not assume it is inevitable or will proceed to infinity just because it has proceeded thus far.

It's not just "now" Simon, come on. You're smarter than this! The gap is a fact that exists because of wage compensation and total cost of the product is not the same. Therefore GDP is always much greater than personal income. How do you think it is possible that "GDP" would be equal to the median income? This would only be possible if the entire national product was distributed in a such egalitarian fashion which was never hitherto achieved. It would imply that ordinary people also own the entire product that is generated in the country or in the world.

That's why I didn't want to use GDP statistics at all and still am against it. Wake up! Qatar has the absolute highest GDP in the world which exceeds $120 000 per person, yet the wages in Qatar are between $300 for immigrant labour and $2500 per month for well-off local specialists, but a million-strong immigrant workforce in Qatar has a 1% death rate. It's not a death camp yet but certainly like a penal camp. Over 2000 will be dead by the time Qatar hosts the World Cup. And that in a nation with 8 times the GDP/capita of China.

I took this as an extreme example, but I think it proves my point.

A lot of unnatural things have in fact happened or been done. The point I am trying to make is that the pie is in fact big enough for everyone to have a share that is not too bad. Everyone, worldwide. Dividing up the pie to make this happen is a very formidable challenge and may even be impossible... But let us not lie to ourselves and commit the sin of defeatism, by pretending the pie was never big enough to begin with. Or that this is necessarily a zero-sum game in which the elites must destroy and crush and immiserize the majority in order to sustain a remotely comfortable way of life.

Please think that above I've noted that "the pie" was always big enough to begin with. That's the most damning and condemning fact of all. So pardon me if after 300 years I'm feeling a bit "defeatist", especially as the system of production which I see follows certain rules, which are not so easy to bend or break. It's not a zero-sum game, but the bad part is that even without malicious intent, purely as a byproduct of normal operation, a lot of people are immiserized.

The fundamental answer is "this is a thing that may or may not happen, but can happen." Basically, you're attempting to prove that guaranteed minimum income can never come into de facto existence on a worldwide basis. Under the present system you may or may not be correct. I would argue there is a realistic chance of transitioning to an environment in which this becomes possible over the next century or so. However, there are many obstacles and many other, grimmer futures that might unfold. It is not certain. My point is that there is no reason to suppose that it is literally impossible.

I think that a "guaranteed minimum income" makes sense under a monetary economy only. If the economy is monetary, then it is most likely capitalistic. If it is capitalistic, the previous 300 years of development show a pretty consistent record of production gains exceeding personal compensation of the average person, and a pretty consistent record of the tendency of monetary capital to concentrate and accumulate. I'm not sure that a guaranteed worldwide minimum income is possible, but I'm also not sure if that is desireable. It is uncertain what kind of purchasing power would that income have and what kind of goals its introduction would pursue.

No, I'm saying that in the extreme limiting end state of a heavily automated global economy that renders low and lightly-skilled labor in large part superfluous to the production of goods... Everybody should be turned into rentiers who live on rent extracted from everyone's control of the whole world.

This is necessary for the survival of the majority of future humans, because the majority of future humans will have relatively little to contribute to the collective enterprise of the production economy through their labor. Because of automation.

My whole point is that even if the present developed nations lose their special privilege, if we just added up all the gross domestic products in the world and divided by the number of people in the world, we'd get a per capita GDP comparable to, say, China. And the idea 'everyone is on average about as wealthy as the people living in China are' may be unappealing to some, and appealing to others, but no one should be saying "I'd rather jump off a cliff than live that way."

We might get a GDP per capita comparable to China (in fact if you calculate world average GDP/c now you'd get that number already), but what I tried to show is that the actual standard of living may - and most likely will - turn out to be much lower than present-day China - even with this "normal" GDP/capita, even if we redistribute to places where there's currently little to no incentive to redistribute to.

As for the last sentence: living standards in China are often exceeding what should've been possible with such a GDP because China is a very production-oriented economy with a huge (and unseen) solidarity system of non-monetary transactions remaining from bygone ages. Hard to explain everything in detail, but the Chinese society is not atomized to the extent Western societies are, because its transition phase from feudalism to socialism and finally present-day capitalism was extremely fast and many changes were very abrupt. Even so, people jumped out of windows when working for Foxconn. And these are people who came from smaller Chinese cities and villages, y'know, who never had an inflated life standard of incredible luxury as seen in some parts of Europe and the US.

If some of these people were ready to kill themselves, I'm not so sure First Worlders would accept any downgrade of their living standards so easily. In fact it has been happening already, with the hollowing-out of industrial zones, outsourcing etc., introduction of temp work contracts, crushing of unions & collective bargaining. It generated a poorly-directed general backlash and things like Trump & Brexit, hardly examples of reform for the better. And it was only a small downgrade, nothing like the one you propose.

You will have to not only deal with the natural hostility of the Masters, but with the enormous hostility of the entire First World population whose life standard was inflated by decades or even centuries of domination - and their own localized class struggle, of course. So they would even feel that you're taking from them the things they've fought very hard to gain, and it would, in a way, be true...

[Simon_Jester]

You've failed to understand my objection. It was a general objection to the use of GDP per capita as a measure of the standard of living.

In this case, I am using it in two roles:

1) As a generalized metric of the world's economic resources. In this context it is not GDP per capita that I am interested in, it is the raw GDP figures themselves. This is using the metric exactly as intended.

2) This is more complicated. I also use GDP per capita as a figure correlated with, or suggestive of likely standards of living in various countries. For this purpose, it does not truly matter whether per capita GDP matches the median wage in that country. What matters is the answer to the question "if we take a basket of countries whose per capita GDP falls between X and Y thousand dollars a year, and see how the citizens of those countries live, do they live in misery caused by economic conditions, or do they live in economic conditions comparable to, say, the 1950s US but with Internet access? Is the wealth of this country sufficient in practice that it realistically CAN support a quality of life reasonably free from hunger, deprivation, and fear?" For this purpose, your objection is at best mildly relevant.

If you are going to object meaningfully to my point, please restrict yourself to comparisons that are relevant TO the point. You keep using Qatar as a counterexample, for instance, but I did not cite Qatar as an example in the first place. Qatar is immaterial to both my first type of use of GDP, and my second.

If you won't stay on point, then your objections, as has often proven to be the case lately, cease to even be directed at my argument. Rather, they become a generalized blast of resentiment directed at some feature of economics you don't like, or some feature of the world you don't like, or some group you have a broad reason to dislike as a category.

I understand why you may have a great deal of resentiment to vent, but it is extremely poor form for you to wander around wasting other people's time by keeping up the pretense that your expression of generic resentiment is a meaningful attempt to engage them in debate.

And if history shows us anything it is that the non-uniform nature of it, the so-called "gap", has only grown and expanded, and not contracted, over capitalism's historical development that spans 200-300 years. Now you come with an absolutely flawed metric for the standard of living - I'd wish we could stop using it alltogether - and say there is a solution to our problems.

No, I say the material underpinnings out of which a solution could be created exist. There is a difference.

I am not a generic blur of the last thousand capitalist advocates you've debated. I am a specific person saying specific things, and have a right to be engaged with as such. Either try to pay attention to what the person in front of you is actually saying, or shut up and go away.

The total productive capacity of the world, with the exception of massive war periods, was often acceptable or even exceeding the requirements to provide a decent, by the standards of the time, life for all or most people in the world. If we consider the greater importance of non-monetary transactions in the past and the fact that the standard of living is not so directly related to GDP, we may discover that we always had a relative abundance, but failed to provide most people with it. The achievement of a universally-spread median world GDP does not mean that the typical world citizen (let's imagine a world united and construct an optimistic model for a moment) would even receive a wage comparable to the average Chinese wage, now. It is painstakingly clear when you look at the GDP vs. consumption patterns and see that there could be a difference of 100% or more between consumption values for nations that have the same GDP / capita. It would internalize the distribution problem, but it will remain unsolved.

My entire argument in this thread reduces to:

"The material requirements for a satisfactory world order exist, the problems are those of social engineering. Solving them requires finding ways for humanity to adapt to a world in which the marginal value of most labor drops to near-zero relative to the rest of the economy, redistribution of wealth within developed societies is one beginning of such a way, as is more widespread industrialization that permits more countries to experiment with different solutions to the same fundamental problems."

The distribution problem is acknowledged but is largely beside the points I am currently making for two reasons:

One, if you observe societies where industrialization has proceeded to completion, yes wealth tends to become concentrated geographically, but so does population. The cities and their suburbs become hives of wealth because they are also hives of people, especially of people with the freedom to choose where to live and work, thus creating a positive feedback loop. The problem of what to do with a rural hinterland that cannot support intense economic activity, but where relatively few people actually live, is serious and significant but not insurmountable.

Counterexamples like Qatar exist because Qatar cannot stabilize in this way for reasons I will discuss later; counterexamples like Malaysia exist possibly for the same reason, and possibly also for the even more obvious reason that they have not finished the transition- the industrialization-generated wealth is all in specific parts of the country, and has had no time to propagate through the creation of supporting infrastructure in the rest of the country, nor has the population completed the demographic transition from rural-dwellers to city-dwellers.

Secondly, while the gap of wealth distribution remains a factor to be considered and potentially an obstacle, in and of itself it need not present an insurmountable obstacle to people living good lives. The average Chinese person today may be far behind the average Chinese person of 1700 in relative terms, since in those days China had one of the world's most prosperous economies, but now it is in the middle of the pack. But the average Chinese person today still enjoys a superior standard of living in many ways.

It is at least possible for everyone to be okay in a world where some groups own two or three or even ten times more than other groups, IF there is enough productive capacity to go around, and a political order that does not allow the richest groups to make the others into beggars.

We do not already live in such a world, but we are much closer than we were two or three or five centuries ago. And yet another twofold or for that matter fourfold or even tenfold increase in productive capacity due to greater technology may well materialize before the end of the human story, and such an increase has the potential to push us over the edge.

The problem with millionaires living in Elysium while everyone else lives in squalid slums is not that millionaires live in Elysium. It is that everyone else lives in squalor. If you see improvements in the squalid slums, the system is improving, regardless of whether Elysium comes down in flames as you might understandably desire. This is not to say Elysium's continued survival is necessary or even desirable, but it is not mutually exclusive with all conceivable good outcomes.

It's not just "now" Simon, come on. You're smarter than this! The gap is a fact that exists because of wage compensation and total cost of the product is not the same. Therefore GDP is always much greater than personal income. How do you think it is possible that "GDP" would be equal to the median income? This would only be possible if the entire national product was distributed in a such egalitarian fashion which was never hitherto achieved. It would imply that ordinary people also own the entire product that is generated in the country or in the world.

And yet GDP still correlates very noticeably with median income, in that median income is several times higher in most rich countries than in most poor countries. Using GDP as a metric while ignoring all other metrics is stupid and could, if followed brainlessly by a drooling idiot, produce foolish results like "Qatar has the best economy in the world for everyone." But I am not proposing to do this, you are not proposing to do this, no one present is proposing to do this!

Your generalized squawk against the existence of GDP as a metric is slipping free of the context in which GDP is being used.

A lot of unnatural things have in fact happened or been done. The point I am trying to make is that the pie is in fact big enough for everyone to have a share that is not too bad. Everyone, worldwide. Dividing up the pie to make this happen is a very formidable challenge and may even be impossible... But let us not lie to ourselves and commit the sin of defeatism, by pretending the pie was never big enough to begin with. Or that this is necessarily a zero-sum game in which the elites must destroy and crush and immiserize the majority in order to sustain a remotely comfortable way of life.

Please think that above I've noted that "the pie" was always big enough to begin with. That's the most damning and condemning fact of all. So pardon me if after 300 years I'm feeling a bit "defeatist", especially as the system of production which I see follows certain rules, which are not so easy to bend or break. It's not a zero-sum game, but the bad part is that even without malicious intent, purely as a byproduct of normal operation, a lot of people are immiserized.

The corresponding silver lining to this cloud is that without any particular benevolent intent, purely as a byproduct of normal operation, people are less immiserized, on the whole, than their ancestors. There are certain localized exceptions, and there are countries where a crippling population explosion combined with catastrophically poor governance are making things worse much faster than economic processes can make things better. But to be an immiserized urban "peasant" of 2017 in most of the world is much better than to be an immiserized rural "peasant" of 1917 or 1817 or 1717.

Everyone was always getting hammered by immiserization and scarcity, that is what it means to have a scarcity economy. The closer you get to a post-scarcity economy, the closer it comes to being possible to fix this, or at least make it cease to be a relevant bad thing. The greatest danger is that capitalism's own contradictions and fuckeries will cause it to self-destruct before it can create a semi-stable post-scarcity economy, and this is a very GREAT danger, but it is not a thing automatically guaranteed to happen.

The fundamental answer is "this is a thing that may or may not happen, but can happen." Basically, you're attempting to prove that guaranteed minimum income can never come into de facto existence on a worldwide basis. Under the present system you may or may not be correct. I would argue there is a realistic chance of transitioning to an environment in which this becomes possible over the next century or so. However, there are many obstacles and many other, grimmer futures that might unfold. It is not certain. My point is that there is no reason to suppose that it is literally impossible.

I think that a "guaranteed minimum income" makes sense under a monetary economy only. If the economy is monetary, then it is most likely capitalistic. If it is capitalistic, the previous 300 years of development show a pretty consistent record of production gains exceeding personal compensation of the average person, and a pretty consistent record of the tendency of monetary capital to concentrate and accumulate. I'm not sure that a guaranteed worldwide minimum income is possible, but I'm also not sure if that is desireable. It is uncertain what kind of purchasing power would that income have and what kind of goals its introduction would pursue.

If we look at an economy that has had time to settle into a steady post-industrial state, and where automation has supplanted most labor...

It's possible that minimum income would flow right through the pockets of the 'poor' and the rich would still own everything of value- but if people are not constantly struggling and miserable, why does this even matter? The reason it becomes a problem is if the rich use their influence to shut off the pipeline that provides sustenance to the masses, causing the public as a whole to be endangered. Countering this is admittedly a major problem, but it is also a specific problem that must be engaged with on its own level, not a general problem that is simply a trivial instance of "but the ownership gap still exists!"

No, I'm saying that in the extreme limiting end state of a heavily automated global economy that renders low and lightly-skilled labor in large part superfluous to the production of goods... Everybody should be turned into rentiers who live on rent extracted from everyone's control of the whole world.

This is necessary for the survival of the majority of future humans, because the majority of future humans will have relatively little to contribute to the collective enterprise of the production economy through their labor. Because of automation.

My whole point is that even if the present developed nations lose their special privilege, if we just added up all the gross domestic products in the world and divided by the number of people in the world, we'd get a per capita GDP comparable to, say, China. And the idea 'everyone is on average about as wealthy as the people living in China are' may be unappealing to some, and appealing to others, but no one should be saying "I'd rather jump off a cliff than live that way."

We might get a GDP per capita comparable to China (in fact if you calculate world average GDP/c now you'd get that number already), but what I tried to show is that the actual standard of living may - and most likely will - turn out to be much lower than present-day China - even with this "normal" GDP/capita, even if we redistribute to places where there's currently little to no incentive to redistribute to.

On the other hand, by the time we reach this state we can expect more automation than we now have, which in turn means more wealth to go around.

Will this still leave room for disastrous local outcomes? Yes. Will there be ways for things to go horribly wrong? No shit, there always are.

But bluntly, this is the only decent future available to us; we might as well at least acknowledge what it would hypothetically be shaped like. If we don't solve the problem of providing sustenance and reasonable comfort in an automated economy, our scenarios range from dystopian, ranging through something like Asimov's Solaria, out to cases where the automated economy itself runs outside all control of its nominal owners and turns the world into a mass of paperclips.

You will have to not only deal with the natural hostility of the Masters, but with the enormous hostility of the entire First World population whose life standard was inflated by decades or even centuries of domination - and their own localized class struggle, of course. So they would even feel that you're taking from them the things they've fought very hard to gain, and it would, in a way, be true...

I'm not even advocating taking anything from anyone (except, of course, the necessary tithe upon the owners and operators of the automated economy, which is the price they pay for living in a civilization and not a dystopian robotic hellscape). I acknowledge that this is a valid point, but it is a specific obstacle to be overcome, not a generic "your entire argument is invalid" argument. The exact form that resistance to change takes will depend hugely on factors that vary from nation to nation, and that are progressing slowly over long periods of time.

The developed nations already most ravaged by neoliberalism may well prove the least able to gracefully make a transition to the automation economy. They are the ones most poisoned with the "who does not work, shall not eat" meme, most poisoned with the "what's mine is mine, others have no claim on it" meme, and so on.

Conversely, the nations best placed to survive may well be the ones that have not crumbled under such memes. Some of the developed nations do better on this metric than others, and many of the developing nations are likely to be resistant to it, China having pride of place among them.

[K. A. Pital]

The first part is again a misunderstanding. Whether GDP matches the median wage well as a proxy or not (I think it does not, and I need to check how strong the correlation is), the problem is that this statistic does not reflect whether a given “GDP” could support a certain standard of life. The wealth of any given country is a direct result of its place in the world production system. China’s wealth would have been drastically curtailed if there was not a much wealthier market in the form of the First World to which goods are exported. Qatar would not have insanely high figures if there was little demand for its oil in the capitalist world system. What I aimed to show is that GDP does not reflect the “wealth”of a nation as such but rather its place in the current world system. By significantly altering the world system (which you propose, by equalizing at least partially the living standard across the world), GDP of many places would no longer be the same.

I will answer the rest a bit later, time permitting.